Russian intelligence opens online service on Darknet
Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has opened a website in the Darknet through which people not living in Russia are invited to send information about threats to Russia's security, reported the Current Time. According to the publication, last December, “Report Information” link appeared on the SVR website. Clicking on the link would bring up a message in English: "If you are outside Russia and have important information about threats to the security of the Russian Federation, you can send it to us in a safe and anonymous way through the virtual services in the Tor network." However, the Russian intelligence service itself has never reported the existence of this website publicly.
To send the information, SVR advises to download the Tor browser or the Tails operating system. The website of the Russian intelligence is located on the “.onion” domain and cannot be reached through conventional browsers. After registering, a user who wants to send a message receives a code from the SVR with five unrelated English words. Using it, the user can send a message and read possible SVR responses. For additional protection, the secret service offers to encrypt the message using the PGP system.
According to the Current Time, the SVR is the first of all European intelligence services to open an online service on the Darknet. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has created a full copy of its website there in 2019.
The publication also draws attention to the fact that all the protection and encryption tools used in the SVR online service in the Darknet are developed in the United States. The first version of Tor appeared in the mid-1990s at the U.S. Navy Research Laboratory. The Tails operating system was created by enthusiasts in the late 2000s, and in 2013 it received the support of the U.S. National Democratic Institute, which the Russian authorities declared an "undesirable organization."